Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/07/fantastic-electric-guitar-buil.html
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Well, colour me surprised no-one has done this before.
Graphite is a great conductor, so this instrument should fare well with AC/DC. And if the music is well-conducted, there will be a crowd under high current.
(FTR, I know some one-year-olds who would go mental trying to pick up those pencils.)
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Colored pencils don’t contain graphite.
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The pencils bring a nice, colorful tone to the sound.
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Don’t tell me facts I don’t want to know.
This is interwebz. Post-fact country.
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I like the pun but I was thinking the exact opposite is unfortunately true. The wood used for the pencils coupled with the inconsistencies between the pencils themselves will make the sound less than ideal.
It’s a cool looking guitar and it will sound fine if he is just jamming in his home or using plenty of effects pedals. But on its own he won’t get the richness of a solid mahogany or alder.
Still awesome fun and very unique.
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More like Luthier Blisset, amirite?
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Sidenote: I’m always eye-rolling about spelling differences like mahogany (EN) / Mahagoni (DE). And for one time, science doesn’t help me because members of the family Meliaceae, mostly genus Swietia does work as well
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Well, I will whisper Rosewood near the end of this topic, but I won’t harp on that.
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I might.
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I wouldn’t fret over it. Not sure most people would pickup on the difference. Nothing worth sticking your neck out over as you’ll only amplify discord.
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The engineer in me would have considered running a strip of hardwood along the back from the neck mounting tongue back to just past the bridge. The neck and bridge would then be joined by solid wood (tremolo rout notwithstanding - perhaps widen it there). It would perhaps be stronger and perhaps even sound better. The guitar would look identical from the front, using shorter pencils to cover it as a kind of veneer. It’s possible that the glued pencils simply aren’t going to be strong enough in the long run. But I could be wrong, and the epoxy matrix might make them very strong indeed. Doing a strength test on a prototype smaller slab of glued pencils would be pretty straightforward.
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I was thinking “looks cool, when will it explode under the tension?” but then I’m not particularly Sciencey.
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FTFY
Why does it always have to be a strat? One of the guitar magazines proclaimed the Les Paul “the king of electric guitars”, but I’d say it’s the Strat, just because that is the most copied design of all time, particularly if you consider all the 80’s “shredder” guitars that used the Strat shape as their basis.
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You’re right to be concerned. The tensions are higher than is perhaps apparent. It is a marvel of try-and-try-again engineering that steel string acoustic guitars can be made that both sound good, and last over 100 years. The pattern of internal bracing of the soundboard that provides strength while still allowing a nice resonance has evolved to mostly be just variations on a standard layout. Electric guitars use lighter strings and have less tension, but still…
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What the hell?
I think you might be a bit high-strung; it’s nothing to get too wound up about. I for one am amped by his creativity.
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The great thing about strats is it is a more modular design. Parts are cheap and relatively easy to swap. And you can buy a cheap strat copy for $300. It’s relatively easy to make one in a garage with fairly rudimentary wood-working skills
Compare that to a les paul. If you want a real Gibson you could be paying well over $1,000. If you wanted to make your own in a garage, you’d need to be a pretty accomplished wood worker because it is a set-neck guitar, with binding, and a carved top.
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